Choosing the Right WordPress Theme

My talk at WordCamp Sofia two weeks ago was related to choosing the right WordPress theme. Slides are available here.

The gist of the talk was making users cautious about their WordPress sites and managing their stack properly, especially in the WordPress context. I find it quite common for users to browse for random, free hacked themes and get their servers attacked from the inside, or becoming a part of a botnet.

That is one of the reasons why I’m quite sensitive when it comes to the WPTRT work. Users choose from several options for picking a theme for their site:

downloading a theme from WordPress.org

purchasing from a freelancer/company building themes

purchasing from a theme market with numerous authors

downloading a theme from a random, unknown website

getting a warez theme installed (trying to cheat the system or just doing a test run of a paid theme before buying)

There are different options too, but these seems as being quite common.

You can see how dangerous the last two options are, not to mention that there are numerous theme markets building themes and not following the best practices, taking care of security, compatibility etc.

My slides outline different popular options of getting themes, a research by Siobhan on free theme markets, and various plugins to test a theme and monitor it on the site once installed. Opinions are welcome (as always).